“Millions of Americans have come to realize that our nation’s long experiment with harsh sentences has failed. It has filled our prisons and made it extremely difficult for ex-inmates to successfully re-enter society. They leave prison after serving long sentences with no understanding of modern technology. Some have never even touched a smartphone...

"When they turn to crime again, nobody should be surprised. Our nation locks up too many people for too long, and it’s just got to end. Welcome to the cause, President Trump. Show us you mean it.”

Chicago Sun Times

CNN’s Van Jones tweeted: “Give the man his due: @realDonaldTrump is on his way to becoming the uniter-in-Chief on an issue that has divided America for generations. Congrats to everyone on both sides who fought for this."

Twitter

“A crucial feature of the Senate plan... is the inclusion of so-called front-end reforms with the goal of a more rational sentencing process. The House version, passed in May, focused solely on ‘back end’ reforms, such as improving prison conditions and easing inmates’ re-entry into society. But tending to the existing prison population without tempering the draconian sentencing laws that caused that population to explode in recent decades is, as Charles Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has put it, ‘naïve and unproductive’...

“Sessions is out. Trump is on board. It’s time to put these necessary changes into action.”

New York Times

From the Right

The right is divided; some criticize the bill's reduced sentences for drug traffickers, while others posit that imprisoning non-violent offenders is counterproductive.

Critics, such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), argue that the bill “is just a misguided effort to let serious felons out of prison... [it] goes soft on some of the worst crimes — trafficking heroin and fentanyl — by allowing most traffickers to spend up to a third of their sentence at home, where many of them will no doubt return to dealing drugs.”

USA Today

“Current law mandates a prison sentence of at least 20 years for a repeat fentanyl drug trafficker. The First Step Act automatically reduces that sentence by five years and further cuts the penalty through a number of changes... [to] less than half of the time that the drug trafficker would have served under current law. This sentencing reduction could apply to a repeat drug trafficker who trafficked more than 400 grams of fentanyl into the U.S., enough to kill 100,000 Americans. The First Step Act also will result in the immediate release of 4,000 felons from prisons.”

Breitbart

Supporters, such as Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), point out that while “Incarceration is an essential law enforcement tool that protects communities and keeps families safe... it also inflicts costs on communities and families, and at some point the negative impact of incarceration on marriage and family can become too stark to ignore. And for non-violent offenders, especially those with no prior criminal history, excessive sentences often do far more harm than good.”

Fox News

“Super-long sentences are a good means for protecting society long-term from its scariest and most violent criminals. But long sentences are not in themselves a terribly effective deterrent against crime – not nearly as effective as swift and certain punishment. A prison sentence is a wakeup for anyone. But for a nonviolent offender, the tail-end years he spends living at taxpayers’ expense often end up just making him less fit for the real world.”